You know the situation: an English language learner is speaking to a native speaker of English. The language learner asks the meaning of a particular word and the native speaker replies with a synonym that is even more obscure and difficult to understand. Are we teachers any better at this? (Hopefully, yes!) Most of us rely on our experience and intution to use high-frequency words that we believe will be more easily understood. But how sharp is your word frequency intuition? Can you adjust your words according to the level of your students? And would you be able to distinguish whether a word falls in the 3K to 5K mid-frequency band or in the 11K to 15K low-frequency band? The LexTutor Frequency Trainer shows you exactly that. Think of it as a training game to refine your frequency intuition.

To generate a new quiz, go to the bottom left corner of the LexTutor Frequency Trainer and select whether you would like to be tested on frequency statistics drawn from the British National Corpus (BNC_uk) or the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). Click the “Build” button and begin! Use the radial buttons to guess which frequency band the listed words belong to and then click “Check.” Re-categorize the incorrect guesses and check again. If you can get 100% in three tries, LexTutor says your intuition is excellent. If not, keep practicing!